Vulnerability Scan

A developer-first guide to vulnerability scanning across SAST, SCA, DAST, and IaC Security—and how to operationalize it in CI/CD.

Definition

A vulnerability scan is an automated check for known weaknesses and misconfigurations across your software surface – source code, third‑party packages, running web apps/APIs, and infrastructure as code. In modern programs, scanning is continuous, shift‑left, and integrated with developer workflows to find and fix issues early.

How a vulnerability scan works

1. Discovery/Targeting – enumerate repos, services, endpoints, IaC files, containers, and SBOMs.
2. Automated analysis – run the right engines:
   • SAST for insecure code/dataflows
   • SCA for CVEs, license risks, transitive deps
   • DAST for runtime issues in web apps/APIs
   • IaC Security for cloud misconfigurations
3. Prioritization – severity + exploitability + asset criticality
4. Developer remediation – actionable guidance in the IDE/PR with auto‑tickets
5. Verification – re‑scan, measure MTTR and fix rate

Types of vulnerability scans (for AppSec)

• SAST (code): analyze source/build artifacts for insecure patterns. → Checkmarx SAST
• SCA (open source): detect vulnerable/licensed components; support SBOMs. → Checkmarx SCA
• DAST (runtime): scan live apps/APIs for auth/session flaws, injections, etc. → Checkmarx DAST
• IaC Security: validate Terraform/CloudFormation/Kubernetes and more pre‑deploy. → Checkmarx IaC Security

Vulnerability scan vs. vulnerability assessment vs. pen test

• Vulnerability scan: automated, breadth‑first detection.
• Vulnerability assessment: adds expert review and risk context.
• Penetration test: human‑led exploitation to validate impact.
  See also: Vulnerability Assessments and VAPT (Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing).

Best practices & tips

• Secure the pipeline: sign artifacts, verify SBOMs, scan containers.
• Shift left: SAST/SCA on each PR; IaC/DAST on merges + nightly.
• Right‑size rules: tune rulesets, standardize suppressions.
• Prioritize by exploitability: severity + reachability + criticality.
• Fix in the IDE: shorten feedback loops.
• Own the backlog: time‑box triage, auto‑ticket, track MTTR.
  

Key metrics

Fix rate (7/30/90‑day), MTTR by severity, exploitable/high‑severity backlog, scan coverage across repos/services, false‑positive rate, and policy‑gate pass rate.

Next step: See how Checkmarx One unifies SAST, SCA, DAST, IaC Security, and more – built for developers and AppSec to ship secure software faster.